Concept Testing Primer

“Concept Testing is the stage in your product development process where a detailed description of a product is presented to prospective customers or users to assess their attitudes and intentions toward the product.” – Business Dictionary

Concept testing is a vital step in the product development process for identifying consumer perceptions, wants, and needs. You should concept test before introducing a new product or service to the market. By doing so, you will fundamentally improve likelihood of market success.

Concept Testing Goals

Successfully executed concept tests should help you accomplish the following:

Determine Your Target Audience

There’s a 100% chance that your new product isn’t going to appeal to every consumer. So rather than taking the spray and pray approach of targeting everyone under the sun, it is vital that you pretest your idea and determine the sub-segment your product is most likely to resonate with. This will help ensure that you tailor your product and marketing messages accordingly.

Assess Your Offering

Consumers and product developers often have different ideas on the usefulness of particular product features. Features you deem as high priority might not seem vital in consumers’ eyes and vice versa. By assessing consumer reactions to your product, you can reconcile your views with theirs and ensure that your product fully meets their needs.

Position Your Product

Many times, even the most useful product struggles to succeed in the marketplace due to poor positioning. This is especially the case for new and highly innovative products/features. As such, it is important to make your product’s benefits readily apparent to the target customer. A pre-launch concept test helps ensure that you can succinctly and effectively convey your value proposition.

Types of Concept Testing

Concept testing can be applied to a wide range of areas including products/services, digital prototypes, and advertising/brand messaging.

Product/Service Testing

Developing a new product is expensive so it is critical for you to identify which features are “needs” versus “wants” and why. After identifying the necessary features, you can prioritize tasks and ensure that your product fulfills these needs.

Digital Prototype Testing

Today, the main success factor for digital products such as mobile apps, desktop apps, or websites is a superior user experience (UX). Concept testing enables you to identify and remedy any pain points that might exist in UX, from ease of use to visual aesthetics.

Ad/Message Testing

Concept testing can help refine your marketing message. This early feedback can help save both effort and advertising dollars. It also helps ensure that the message you are trying to convey is getting across to your target audience.

Concept Testing With GlimpzIt

GlimpzIt not only makes concept testing easy, but also adds richness to your respondent feedback with unstructured answers (pics, videos, open ended text). Concept testing on GlimpzIt is as simple as creating a conversation prompt (question you would like to ask), attaching appropriate resources (like videos or images of the concepts to be tested), and choosing your target audience.

As the respondent feedback rolls in, GlimpzIt analyzes it in real time, and delivers results via dynamic summary dashboards.

With GlimpzIt, respondents don’t just pick one concept over the other for you, they tell you why they prefer a particular concept on a deep granular level.

Here are some examples of companies that have successfully leveraged GlimpzIt to concept test their products/messaging before launch.

ACME – Package Testing

Package design can be just as important as the product itself. Recognizing this fact, ACME decided to use GlimpzIt to ask consumers what their ideal packaging for cookies would look like. After they gathered and analyzed all their data, they were able to create a package design that appealed to the average consumer.

With there being so many apps out in the marketplace, it’s important for developers to create a product that is both unique and that consumers would love. Recognizing this fact, Trip Planner, a technology startup in the travel-space, decided to use GlimpzIt to ask consumers to walk through their new mobile app and identify features they dislike or additional features they want implemented. After gathering all their data, they were able to revamp their product and create an app consumers enjoy using.

The Hispanic Institute sought to create an engaging advertisement that would appeal to their viewers. To accomplish this, they decided to leverage GlimpzIt to ask people to watch their ad and explain how they felt about it. After gathering their responses, the Hispanic Institute was able to make the appropriate edits and create an ad that resonated with their audience.